It is not very likely that Lowell was thinking specifically of “Sir Launfal” when he wrote this. It is more likely that he would have named “Prometheus,” “Columbus,” or “Freedom” if he had been asked to name names; and yet it is not straining language too far to say that when he took up an Arthurian story he had a different attitude toward the whole cycle of legends from that of Tennyson who, a half dozen years before, had begun to revive the legends for the pleasure of English-reading people. The exuberance of the poet as he carols of June in the prelude to Part First is an expression of the joyous spring which was in the veins of the young American, glad in the sense of freedom and hope. As Tennyson threw into his retelling of Arthurian romance a moral sense, so Lowell, also a moralist in his poetic apprehension, made a parable of his tale, and, in the broadest interpretation of democracy, sang of the levelling of all ranks in a common divine humanity. There is a subterranean passage connecting the “Biglow Papers” with “Sir Launfal”; it is the holy zeal which attacks slavery issuing in this fable of a beautiful charity, Christ in the guise of a beggar. The invention is a very simple one, and appears to have been suggested by Tennyson’s “Sir Galahad,” but the verses in the poem which linger longest in the mind are not those connected with the fable, but rather the full-throated burst of song in praise of June. Indeed, one might seriously maintain from Lowell’s verse that there was an especial affinity which he held with this month. Witness the joyous rush of pleasure with which “Under the Willows”[80] is begun, and the light-heartedness with which Hosea Biglow leaves the half-catalogue manner rehearsing the movement of Spring in “Sunthin’ in the Pastoral Line,” and leaps almost vociferously into the warm, generous air of June, when “all comes crowdin’ in.” The poem entitled “Al Fresco” is but a variation on the same theme; when he first published it, save the opening stanza, in the _Anti-Slavery Standard_, he gave it the title of “A Day in June.” And when, compelled to lie indoors, he found a compensation in Calderon singing to him like a nightingale, it was still a wistful look he cast on his catbird that joined with the oriole and the cuckoo to call him out of doors, and he sighed to think that he could not like them be a pipe for June to play on. “The Nightingale in the Study” was written when he sought in illness for something that would seclude him from himself; but the three poems of 1848 were the outcome of a nature so tingling with vitality that expression was its necessity, and spontaneity the law of its being. Literature, freedom, and nature in turn appealed to the young enthusiast; the visions he saw stirred him, in the quiet of Elmwood, to eager, impetuous delivery; and his natural voice was a singing one. CHAPTER VI SIX YEARS 1845-1851